This may not apply directly to VMware, but if you aren’t paying attention to the cloud you are doing yourself a disservice. It’s coming, and this podcast (or podcasts as the case may be) addresses some of the security considerations that “Cloud” brings to the table. Cloud Computing Software Development, Testing, and Security
VMware has produced a 31 page security hardening guide covering the different aspects of hardening the Virtual Infrastructure. By introducing a layer of abstraction between the physical hardware and virtualized systems running IT services, virtualization technology provides a powerful means to deliver cost savings via server consolidation as well as increased operational efficiency and flexibility.
-> Continue reading VI 3 Hardening Guide
This is a guest post by Darky from #ESX on EFNet. A lot of the time an ESX/VI administrator will not always have access to the SAN infrastructure. Often there can be frustration in trying to work with that SAN team cooperatively to determine whether or not the performance issue seen in an ESX environment
-> Continue reading Benchmarking and Troubleshooting VM Storage I/O Performance
Thomas at Tandem wrote a wonderful PDF on setting up Site Recovery Manager using the Netapp Simulator. PDF Can be downloaded here
Trilead VM Explorer is a management tool that eases management, backup and disaster recovery tasks in your VMware ESX Server environment. You get maximum flexibility: backups can be stored to ESX, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD based storage platforms or directly to a SAN. Our newest edition even has beta support for the ESX 3i server.
-> Continue reading Free ESX and ESXi Backups – Trilead VM Explorer
One of these is archived, the other scheduled to go off on Dec. 16th. Both require registration, and are worthwhile, despite the obligatory sales pitches. http://research.pcpro.co.uk/detail/RES/1224768378_490.html This one has already happened, and is available on demand. http://www.netiq.com/events/display.asp?cid=20081114152024NVKN&src=smm This is the Dec16th event.
Thought I’d share, that since I’ve opened professionalvmware.com, I’ve changed from Zoundry Raven to Windows Live Writer Beta. It’s a world of difference. How was I blogging before this?
You’ve got redundant power, a UPS, redundant hosts, redundant networking, etc. Yet despite your best efforts to make things solid, something happens. Disks get corrupt, files go away, Chuck Norris divides by zero, and in general “Bad Things” happen. What do you do when these “Bad Things” happen in the virtual world? Despite the inherent
-> Continue reading Virtual Disk Damaged? – Basic VMDK Repair
I just thought you all should be aware of this KB Article at Symantec’s site: Question/Issue: Is VMware VMotion ESX server supported with Symantec AntiVirus and Symantec Endpoint Protection? Solution: Symantec considers running Symantec AntiVirus Clients and Symantec Endpoint Protection Clients in VMware environments running Vmotion a supported configuration. At this time running the Symantec
-> Continue reading Clarifying Symantec “Support” for ESX
kernel: testing NMI watchdog … <4>WARNING: CPU#0: NMI appears to be stuck This is what I was greeted with this morning on a 64bit RHEL 5 VM. After looking around the internet a bit, I found that this was a guest OS problem that was caused but a number of things. First, was the resource
-> Continue reading 64bit VM Error – NMI Appears to be Stuck
Screenshot Tour: VMware Converter 4 Beta – Linux Conversion After some fighting, I was unable to get the Windows Converter 4 package installed on my XP VM. However, I did have some great success in installing Converter 4 and converting an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS virtual machine. These screenshots begin after converter is installed. We has
-> Continue reading Screenshot Tour: VMware Converter 4 Beta – Linux Conversion
In cleaning out my RSS reader I happened upon an interesting little site: CompareMyVM is a free tool that allows you to compare your VMware ESX Server virtual machine resource allocations with that of the community at large. You can compare by application category to see how your peers are allocating resources to gain the
-> Continue reading Compare My VM!
VM /ETC clued me in on this one, but it’s worth mentioning here as well: The VMware Converter 4.0 Public Beta is available. The next version of VMware’s stand alone and enterprise converter is now in beta. Like Mr. /ETC says, the links have been hit or miss for registration and download, but once you
-> Continue reading VMware Converter 4.0 Public Beta available
Found a great resource explaining quite a few of the esxcfg-* commands, what they are and their use. They’re copied here for future reference. NOTE: These will work from the rcli, SSH to the service console, or via VIMA. I’ve not tested these on ESXi (as the Service Console is ‘unsupported’) To get a feel
-> Continue reading Those esxcfg- commands.
Today, at some ungodly hour of the morning, VMware updated two security announcements: VMSA-2008-0017.1 – Was updated to change some CVE numbers VMSA-2008-0016.2 – Was updated to include information about update 3 As last time you can get all security advisories from VMware’s site: http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/ Technorati : ESX, ESXi, Security, VMware, VMware Security Del.icio.us :
-> Continue reading VMware Security Updates
This is actually a nice VMware common support issue matrix put together by VMwarewolf. Click the link or the picture, extract the zip, open the resulting html in your browser, and go! Download the Zip. Technorati : esx, support, support matrix, vi3, vmware Del.icio.us : esx, support, support matrix, vi3, vmware Zooomr : esx, support,
-> Continue reading Common system management issues in VMware Infrastructure
If like me you accepted most of the defaults the first go around when installing VMware’s Update Manager, you may have found yourself in a situation where there is not enough disk space to contain all of the files. Should this happen, and you need to change the location, you can edit the settings XML
-> Continue reading Update Manager – Changing Default Patch Location
I didn’t know this until today, but according to KB 1687 both soft and hard page faults will cause a context switch into the virtualization layer, which in turn causes additional overhead. This was clued in by a VMware engineer looking over a case of horrid performance that we’ve been encountering. Hard page faults involve
-> Continue reading Context Switched Page Faults
After much exploring, I’ve found a nice little PDF that describes the communication flow, and IP port use. This is brought to you by the Virtualization Evangelist VMware VI network communications and port usage diagram
Came across this in my browsing, figured it was worth repeating here for my own future reference: RPMS for VMWare ESX 3.5 Technorati : 3rd Party RPMs for ESX, ESX, ESX RPMs, VMware Del.icio.us : 3rd Party RPMs for ESX, ESX, ESX RPMs, VMware Zooomr : 3rd Party RPMs for ESX, ESX, ESX RPMs, VMware
-> Continue reading Useful, Yet Scary – 3rd Party RPM’s for ESX 3.5